text to speech

Google has just dropped a Google Translate update into the Play Store, bringing it into a new ICS-flavored age. The most obvious change is the switch over to a Holo interface complete with clean drop down menus, an action bar, and better speech recognition. For the weary world traveler, things also get easier with wider language support.

The app performs sometimes imperfect text translation between 64 different languages. The app can also listen and transcribe spoken words in 17 languages to save you keystrokes. This version ups the number of dialects that can be spoken out loud by the phone to 40, including Esperanto (which people totally still speak someplace). Any translation that uses non-Latin characters will be spelled out for you so you can attempt to pronounce it.